Gran Turismo 5 cost roughly $60 million to develop

by Ben Gilbert on Nov 5th 2009 4:58PM

At the annual SEMA car show in Las Vegas this week, Gran Turismo 5 creative lead Kazunori Yamauchi was on-hand demoing his game for showgoers and talking to the press. Amidst a torrent of questions from Autoweek, Yamauchi roughly calculated the cost of creating Gran Turismo 5: a cool $60 million. That's what five years of development on a single game has cost Polyphony Digital thus far, an amount Yamauchi says was totally justified in order to "get it right."

"We threw away the legacy code from GT4 and started from scratch ... It's been five years from [the release of] GT4, and that's the same amount of time it took to develop the first GT4." And rather than dodging the reasoning behind the lack of a solid GT5 release date anywhere outside of Japan, Yamauchi flatly offered, "That's more depending on SCEA marketing decisions." Allow us to venture a guess – first half of 2010, perhaps?

Gran Turismo 5

[Via VGChartz]

Source

Tags: budget, development, gran-turismo, gran-turismo-5, gt5, kazunori-yamauchi, money, polyphony-digital, scea, sema, sony, Sony-Computer-Entertainment-America

Reader Comments (115)

gt3 came out much earlier and sold 15 million so it dont seem much like a gamble

I got tired of the GT series after GT2 and only bought GT3 because it was a new PS2 version of the game. Didn't buy GT4 or Prologue but I liked the Japanese version of the GT5 demo because it had the in-car cam that the US version of the demo didn't. I loved that angle and it ALMOST made me buy the full retail version of Prologue...but I couldn't get over that it had NO car damage.

That being said, I think I'm really starting to want this game. 1080p, 60fps, REALISTICALLY MODELED in-car cam AND car model damage???? Yea, this has my 60 bones. My PS3 and 1080p TV will thank me.

60 million worth of crap

I've been playing Forza 3 non-stop and love it to death, but after I see a screenshot from GT5 it reminds me which game is the bestest game of them all.

I will buy this game for these reasons.. One, The love of cars that I have. Two, the expense of it all has to mean quality and that is something I have to give credit for and want to support it- not just for them but for other developers to follow and create better bigger more beautiful games. And finally because the game will be ridiculous! Im getting the racing wheel and ALL on this one. Can Anyone tell me if they are coming out with an official Racing blue-tooth periphial wheel for this game? I want to know so I can wait for it and not but some other less than periphial.

Man, thats some money!

GT5 will be huge when it releases. I can't wait! Hopefully the great marketing Sony has been doing continues into the next year for GT5, GOW3, Heavy Rain, and FF13.

And hopefully PD/SCE releases GT5 in simultaneous world-wide launch!

These screens look great but I'm thinking just a bit too jaggy for me right now..

I really hope Polyphony is working extra hard on anti-aliasing for the final release.

i hope youre being sarcastic lol

They're nice screens but obviously over-sampled.

This game will never make that much back.

You have to remember there are a lot of other costs associated with it. You don't get 300 million in profit minus 60 million in costs.

If you look at Crackdown it sold 1.5 million copies.

1.5M x 60 = 90 million dollars. Even with a development cost of something like 10 million dollars it just about broke even according to Realtime Worlds.

Damn even Modern Warfare sold over 10 million copies and that same year Activision reported losses of a few hundred million.

They will still make the money back just they are using another strategy.

They took months to model each car and modelled several hundred cars. Now those cars can be used throughout multiple games and all the easy stuff like new game mechanics and new physics systems can be changed around.

So basically GT5 = 800 cars + Physics system and 50 tracks

GT6 = Same 800 cars + some new models, physics system upgraded and new tracks added

GT7 - Same 800 cars + even more models, further upgraded physics system and more tracks.

Hardest part about a simulator is modelling the cars as each car can take months. Once you've got the hard part out of the way you can reuse those models in multiple games. Those several hundred cars that took so much time and development money will pay off in spades for all the Gran Turismo games on this generation of Playstation consoles.

@Tony:
I'd like to hear your reasoning on why the car designs were the hardest aspects of making GT. I mean, if they had licensed blueprints from the manufacturers themselves, wouldn't it be easy from there? It's not like Sony has the experience to build and market cars in the first place.